1.20.2010

Insubordiknit Nashville

For my birthday this year I decided to go to the Nashville Insubordiknit spinning workshop. There was a closer workshop last fall, but due to shop scheduling problems, that one really wasn't a possibility for me, plus waiting for the Nashville workshop forced me to stop procrastinating about taking a trip down to visit Nieves.

I could go on and on about the workshop and everything we learned, but it is all on Jacey's site so you can just see it there. Jacey was an amazing teacher, informative and entertaining. I was definitely one of the more inexperienced spinners in the group and with the exception of a couple of techniques I had very few problems. My favorite thing that we learned over the weekend was corespinning. I LOVE CORESPINNING!!! I understood the concept of corespinning, it was just a technique that I never bothered to try. The yarns produced by spinning carded fiber around a core yarn are light and fluffy and the technique really shows off the contents of a batt (especially a sparkly batt.) Here are the pictures of my favorite yarns so far.

My first corespun yarn. Jacey gave us some brown carded fiber to learn on. I later went back and autowrapped the yarn with some metallic red embroidery thread (you had to expect me to put some sparkles in somewhere.)

Next is the supercoiled yarn. I spun the single before class with scrap Ashland Bay top that was in the back of the shop. This was a really fun technique, but very time intensive when you calculate the amount of yarn that you end up with (it took me two hours to spin 10 yards.)

Last is the corespun that I spun up last night. I made a super sparkly batt just to practice this technique on my Traveller and I was so happy with the resulting yarn that I carded up a duplicate batt to make another hank of it. Lovely sparklies make me happy!